Scott McCracken
The first of three large packages has just arrived at Keele. Back in January, I made a trip to Ottawa to see George Thomson, a long-planned visit to have a look through George’s papers, which he has generously offered to put at the disposal of the whole team editing the Richardson correspondence. After a long delay at Philadelphia, I arrived very late in Ottawa, but George was there to meet me and drove me to my hotel. Because of the lateness of my arrival, proper conversation had to wait until the next day, but once begun it didn’t really stop. For three days, we talked incessantly about Richardson, the letters, Pilgrimage, politics, and life in general. We only really stopped to eat, when George took me out to a selection of local restaurants, in which he was always greeted by name. George’s basement is an Aladdin’s cave of Richardsonia. Box files of letters, filing cabinets of papers and articles, maps of the coast around Trevone, periodicals, and books. All neatly shelved in rooms where the walls are hung with George’s fine collection of contemporary Canadian art. When it came to select items for the Letters project, I felt like Francis Drake looting the riches of the New World. As some of the material was passed to George by Harold Fromm perhaps a better of way of putting it was that the Richardson Society has inherited the legacies of two great Richardson scholars, George H. Thomson and Gloria Fromm. The material will be invaluable to Richardson scholars. Once it has all arrived and has been sorted out it will be available to the editorial team and other Richardson scholars.
Dorothy Richardson Blog 